What is ripple?

The value of XRP, which is the settlement token of Ripple’s payment network for banks, rose by 32,377% in 2017. You read that correctly: thirty-two thousand percent. That shatters the price rises this year of bitcoin (1,221%), litecoin (4,841%), or ether (8,978%).

At the outset of 2017, one XRP was .01 cents, or one hundredth of one cent. At the end of December, one XRP is above a dollar.

What is Ripple?

Ripple sells a product to banks and financial services companies that allows them to send and receive international payments and settle transactions more quickly and more cheaply than their existing systems.

Ripple is a San Francisco-based company (originally called Opencoin), that has raised nearly $100 million in funding and is led by CEO Brad Garlinghouse; it offers two main products, xCurrent and xRapid; and the settlement token of xRapid is XRP.

Most people refer to all of those things as Ripple, which can be confusing.

Ripple’s network of nodes is akin to the bitcoin blockchain. And although Ripple’s network did not launch until 2012, the concept originated in 2004, which predates bitcoin, as Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin wrote in 2013.

As Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas puts it, “Since its creation in 2012, XRP Ledger has been operating as a next-generation alternative to the proof-of-work concept that was originally introduced by Bitcoin. As the root ledger for the digital asset XRP, XRP Ledger is an enterprise blockchain supporting the institutional use case of cross-border payments.”

Remember it this way: XRP is to Ripple what ether is to Ethereum, or what bitcoin is to the bitcoin blockchain.

But there’s an important difference between XRP and bitcoin. XRP was never intended to be a public digital currency the way that bitcoin was. It is merely a utility: the banks or financial institutions that use xRapid conduct their transactions in XRP. The company calls XRP a “settlement token.”

Ripple has no mining like the bitcoin blockchain, where more bitcoins are created every time a miner uploads transaction data—instead, Ripple transactions are verified by multiple parties to achieve consensus.

There will never be any new Ripple coins created. Ripple owns 60 billion of the 100 billion XRP in existence (when you look up XRP’s market cap, those 60 billion are not included). And the success of Ripple as a payment network does not necessarily rely on the price of XRP.

The appeal of Ripple to banks is the ability to move large amounts of currency quickly and cheaply: XRP transactions clear in under 4 seconds on average, the company says. Compare that to the bitcoin blockchain, where transactions are now frequently taking around an hour to go through.

Why has XRP risen so much? Where can you buy some?

Looking to buy XRP? Coinbase, the most popular mainstream brokerage for buying crypto, does not yet offer it. Coinbase only trades in bitcoin, ether, litecoin, and bitcoin cash. If you want to buy XRP, some of your options are Kraken, Bitstamp, ShapeShift, Bitso, or GateHub.

(Caveat: cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile, with big swings up and down, week in and week out; Yahoo Finance is not dispensing investing advice, just giving you information on how to buy if you wish.)

So why is XRP rising in value so quickly?

Price of ripple (XRP) in 2017, through Dec. 28

Ripple has made a lot of news in the past year or two as it rapidly expands its list of high-profile partners.